Debating the Pros and Cons of Potential WPBL Rule Innovations

Two-hour clock, HR derby in extras, "super" OF assists, limitless PR, scoring by inning, and the Golden Batter

During last week’s news rundown we learned the Women’s Pro Baseball League is considering a number of interesting rule innovations for the 2026 inaugural season. As WPBL co-founder Keith Stein told NBC News: “We’ve got to come out of the gate with some innovation, something fresh.”

Here are the potential rule changes mentioned in David K. Li’s great article last month:

A host of unorthodox rules are under consideration for the WPBL, including a two-hour time limit, a “golden at-bat,” limitless pinch runners, inning-by-inning score competitions, a home run contest to break ties, and outfield assists at home plate that also result in trail runners being wiped out.

Three of those ideas are straight out of Banana Ball, one is borrowed from the MLB All-Star Game, and the other two appear to be original proposals. It should be noted that this is likely not an exhaustive list of options on the table, but simply a handful that were mentioned in the article.

As I wrote last week, I’m all for innovation and I agree a little extra juice via fun rules will help draw in fans – but I also think it’s important that the WPBL be recognizable as a genuine baseball game. The league is helping build the pipeline for girls to keep playing baseball through high school and college by giving them a light at the end of the tunnel: the opportunity to play professionally. The pro game they aspire to should feel like the game they played growing up as much as possible.

Let’s break down these potential rule tweaks one by one:

Mark Buehrle warms up for the Savannah Bananas with 32 minutes and 40 seconds left on the two-hour game clock on August 15th, 2025. Photo by Justin Jabs.

Two-Hour Time Limit

Last month I was lucky enough to attend my first Savannah Bananas game. It was so much fun – honestly more fun than I was expecting. Banana Ball is constant stimulation in the best way, a runaway train of entertainment from first pitch until the final out.

Or until two hours pass, that is. After the timer expires, you can’t start a new inning and the score stands.

WPBL games will already be 7 innings. Do we really need a two-hour time limit like in Banana Ball? For context, I dug into the box scores from the latest Women’s Baseball World Cup to see how long those 7-inning games took¹:

Tie games, the home team winning, and the mercy rule means not every game lasted exactly seven innings. On average, games took 2 hours and 10 minutes to complete. Each inning took 19.36 minutes making a full seven inning game last 2 hours and 15 minutes. That’s well within the ballpark of two hours and still an incredibly reasonable amount of time to spend watching a baseball game, in my opinion.

The Bananas created the two-hour clock well before Major League Baseball adopted the pitch clock, back when popular opinion said baseball was too long and too slow. The Firefighters-Bananas game I saw ended naturally before the clock expired. I have to admit the countdown timer you see in the photo above was a bit of a distraction for me. I already feel rushed and like I’m missing out when I get stuck in a long concessions line at a Milwaukee Brewers game; that anxiety spiked tenfold while watching the Bananas.

I’m sure a strict two-hour limit would make the WPBL an easier product to sell to broadcast partners. If that’s what helps get the league on the air more broadly, then by all means, go for it! Otherwise I don’t care for the idea, so long as the league adopts some sort of pace of play clock like we see in the Northwoods League or college baseball.

Golden At-Bat

I’ll let Bananas broadcaster Josh Talevski share the Golden Batter rule for the uninitiated:

This is one of the most popular Banana Ball innovations recently, even generating “a little buzz” at an MLB owners’ meeting last year. I doubt it ever happens in Major League Baseball, nor do I necessarily want it to – it feels a bit too different to add to the sport after more than a hundred years of box scores.

But for a brand new league trying to draw in fans like the WPBL? I think it’s perfect.

People become fans of sports teams in three ways, basically:

• Proximity. They follow the local team.

• Generational. Mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers pass down their fandom.

• Player-centric. Fans fall in love with a particular player, which deepens their connection to the player’s team and the sport at large.

My initial connection to Major League Baseball was generational, and then later proximity-based when I went to school in Milwaukee and moved to the Bay Area to work for the A’s.

The only new sport I’ve picked up since then is women’s basketball. The Caitlin Clark buzz exposed me to March Madness for the first time in 2024, where Angel Reese became my favorite player. My wife and I later went to our first WNBA game to see the Chicago Sky play the Minnesota Lynx. With the Sky eliminated, the Lynx became our default rooting interest in last year’s playoffs. I soon fell in love with Napheesa Collier’s game, which made the Lunar Owls an easy choice for my Unrivaled team.

Fast-forward to today. Phee and the Lynx are beginning their title run while the Sky sit at home amidst Angel Reese trade rumors. Now I’m left to wonder: is it just the allure of the postseason, or do the Lynx have a stronger hold on my heart than the Sky?

In short, my entire WNBA fandom has been player-driven. The money I spend on merchandise, the advertising revenue from watching games on TV, the cash from our ticket sales, the very fabric of my connection to the sport: it’s all because of Reese, Collier, Marina Mabrey, Courtney Williams, Allisha Gray, and everyone in between.

The Golden At-Bat rule elevates superstars. As Talevski said, it ensures the best hitter is at the plate in the most pivotal situations. The WPBL draft pool is full of fantastic players and fans just need an opportunity to get to know them. Think of the buzz if Mo’ne Davis hits a walk-off on Opening Day 2026 thanks to this crazy fun rule.

The headlines write themselves. I’m all for it.

Limitless Pinch Runners

We don’t have many specifics to go off of for this one. My best guess is this proposal allows managers to replace someone with a pinch runner any time they reach base, but when the inning turns over, the original player returns to their spot in the field/lineup.

So, how often do these ballplayers run? Using the aforementioned 2024 Women’s Baseball World Cup² as a barometer: collectively, the six finalists reached first base 347 times during the tournament (201 singles, 110 walks, 36 hit-by-pitches). Yes, you can certainly steal while standing on second or third, and no, we don’t know for sure if second base was open for the taking each of those 347 times.

Regardless, World Cup teams stole 44 bases during the tournament, or around 12.7% of the time. For contrast, using the same (admittedly fuzzy) math, MLB players reached first base 42,776 times in 2022 – the last season before the bases increased in size – and stole 2,468 bags, or a rate of 5.8%. The sample sizes are vastly different, but the women’s stolen base efficiency (44-for-60, or 73.3%) was essentially on par with the men (75.4%) in these two scenarios.

Running can be a big part of the women’s game. Whether that means coaches should be allowed to pinch-run with reckless abandon, I’m not so sure. If you’re letting teams sub in a faster runner all the time, why not go with limitless substitutions like in basketball? It would take away from the specialness of the Golden Batter, for one. I foresee a rule like this being confusing for fans and inadvertently penalizing well-rounded teams. Mark me down as “indifferent” on this one.

Inning-by-Inning Score Competitions

Like the two-hour clock, this was another rule I saw up close in Chicago last month with the Savannah Bananas. Essentially every inning is its own mini-competition: win the inning, get a point, and whoever has the most points at the end of the game wins.

This prevents one team going up 7-0 in the first inning for a lopsided, boring affair – in theory, the leading team would only be up 1 point to 0. It also presents the possibility for a “walk off” by the home team every single inning, which sounds fun at first, but starts to lose its luster before long.

Ultimately, I think this rule idea is just too different from fundamental baseball to have legs in the WPBL.

Home Run Contest Tiebreaker

My wife Stephanie and I have hosted a party for the MLB All-Star Game every year since 2014.

Most friends don’t stick around until the end of the game – it’s a Tuesday night, after all – but the few who remained this year got a special treat. Unbeknownst to us at the time, when the All-Star Game is tied after nine innings it goes to a “swing-off.”

Kyle Schwarber, one of my all-time favorite players, dominated the first ever HR contest tiebreaker this summer and earned ASG MVP honors. It will go down as one of my favorite all-star memories.

A similar tiebreaker is on the table for the WPBL.

If the league doesn’t adopt a two-hour cap, this would be an exciting way to keep games to a reasonable length. I like it more than the ghost runner rule, and I like it infinitely more than games ending in ties.

Returning to our Women’s Baseball World Cup example: teams hit 9 home runs in 844 at-bats last August, just a little over 1% of the time.

We don’t yet know the specifics of what ballparks WPBL games will be played in next year or what the offensive environment will be like. At last year’s World Cup, the fences weren’t quite as deep as they normally are for Thunder Bay Border Cats games.

If dingers are a typical part of a WPBL game rather than an excitingly rare happenstance, then I’m all in for tie games being decided by a swing-off. Future draftee Ashton Lansdell has been hitting bombs in Home Run Derby X for years now, after all. I would love to see her step up to the plate with a tie game on the line!

homerunderbyx

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But if homers will be as hard to come by as they were in the WBWC, there might need to be a different solution. Hitting off an opposing pitcher is certainly much different than hitting off your coach, and I’ll fully admit we did not get to see any batting practice when we saw those World Cup games so I could be off base here. It’s just something to consider.

Outfield Assists at Home Impact Trail Runners

One of my favorite plays in baseball is the runner tagging up from third on a fly ball.

Will they break for home? How strong is the outfielder’s arm? Will the catcher corral the ball? At the end of it, you’ve got a run or an out. The anticipation, the direct competition between two players’ skills – it really excites me.

Once again we don’t have a lot of details on this proposal, but it seems that if you’re out on a tag-up-from-third situation or rounding third-to-home on a double, every runner behind you on the bases is also out.

I like the idea of adding extra stakes to some of my favorite plays on the field, so long as there aren’t any unintended consequences of those plays becoming less frequent. Imagine the bases are loaded with no outs, for example. The batter hits a fly ball, not deep but probably deep enough to get the runner in. The call to send the runner home is borderline – are you really going to tag up and head home when there’s a chance you getting out ends the entire inning? The math probably says it’s not worth it.

It seems like there’s a possibility this rule makes players more risk-averse rather than adding exciting moments to the game. Consider me curious on this one.

Those are my thoughts on the possible new rules. To recap:

• Pro Golden Batter ✅

• Potentially pro HR tiebreakers 👍 and “super” OF assists 👍

• Indifferent on limitless pinch runners 🤷‍♀️, and

• Against the two hour limit ❌ and inning-by-inning scoring ❌.

More importantly, what are your thoughts? Drop a comment below!

1. The first game of the tournament was a forfeit, and the Gold Medal game box score did not list the duration.

2. I feel like I’ll be returning to this well often until we get some actual WPBL game statistics to analyze. The new league will feature a number of national team players and the World Cup stats are readily available, so hopefully folks don’t mind the frequent comparison.